October 12, 2016

October 09, 2016

Keijo -- ep 1

I'm not going to dignify it with all the exclamation points they included in
the title (fuly 8 of them). I quit after about 1 minute and have no urge at all to watch any more
of it. It will, frankly, be worth plundering come the day, assuming I can keep
my lunch down while doing so.

Here's an example of what the show has to offer:

It's a bad sign when a fan service show doesn't get a post at Fapservice,
but this one hasn't, at least so far.

This ranks down with "milk vampires" on the "thoroughly
disgusting" scale, and below "High School DxD". And that takes
some work.

The art in this is really gorgeous; it's very well done. The character
designs are nice for the most part. The basic conceit of the show is a bit
strange, but that's true of many series which otherwise turned out to be really
good.

But this series, at least so far, isn't really good. It's actually pretty
bad. The problem is the writing. The story is melodrama, with bad guys who are
REALLY bad, almost mustache twirlers (despite being clean shaven) and a female
lead (Princess Fine) who is so brave and kind and dedicated that she's like a
refugee from a Ghibli movie.

Everyone associated with the good guys is handsome or beautiful and is
honorable and kind and brave and self-sacrificing. You kind of expect them all
to have halos.

Everyone associated with the bad guys is brutal and sadistic and evil. Where
are the horns and the whiff of brimstone?

The bad guys are Germans, from the nation of "Germania". The good
guys are from the Duchy of Eylstadt. They show a map at one point, and a far as
I can tell, the director cut a piece off of Austria to be Eylstadt.

There's only one character who is an enigma, Major Belkman. Nominally he's a
German, but he isn't acting like all the others. What does he really want? What
is he trying to accomplish? Unfortunately, that isn't the story; he's a minor
character (at least so far). If I had to guess, I'd guess he's a witch or
related to them. But he's an obvious candidate for a heel-face-turn before the
series is over.

October 08, 2016

Vivid Strike -- ep 2

The first half of this episode is "A day in Fuuka's life". It's a
week after the previou episode and they've gotten into a routine. Fuuka sleeps
in a spare bedroom in Nove's apartment, and gets up at 4:30. She goes to the gym
and cleans it, and then Einhart shows up and they go for a run, and then go to
Nove's apartment for a big breakfast.

Fuuka works the front desk until Yumina shows up after school. The kids show
up after that, and Fuuka trains. And after the gym closes she does some final
cleaning and then goes back to Nove's apartment and collapses in bed.

She doesn't look unhappy, and considering her history it is understandable.
This is one of the better deals she's had lately and everyone treats her well.
Her day is a long one, but the work isn't onerous, and the training is
effective. In just a week she has already noticed a change.

Einhart knows that Fuuka has a huge well of magic and part of the training by
everyone is to try to teach her how to access that and bring it out. It appears
occasionally; once in a while she throws a punch and her fist glows and the
punch is particularly powerful. But she doesn't seem to be able to do it
consistently.

And another thing they want to do is teach her "Power Mode". That's
the new collective name for the adult mode transformations of Einhart, Vivio,
Rio and... Miura and Corona. Who have also learned to do it. And that's pretty
cool. (That may have been another reason Miura came over, to learn that.)

They manage to get her to do it for the first time in this episode, even
though she doesn't have a magical device. (Yet.)

October 04, 2016

Matoi the Sacred Slayer -- ep 1

AKA "Soushin Shoujo Matoi". I think this could end up being
pretty good. There are demons who come to Earth and possess people, turning them
demonic. Ordinary weapons are useless against them, and the first one we see is
defeated by a young woman that the British Army calls "fatima". For
her it's easy. She seems to have a power they call "Divine Union".

And then we leave the UK and go to Japan where we meet our main characters,
most of whom are difficult to take seriously. The show appears to not be
massively serious; it isn't horror though some of the images we see in the first
episode could have come from a horror series. The main character is a
middle-school girl named Matoi whose interesting wish is to be ordinary. She
doesn't want to be special.

Her mother is dead and she lives with her father, Shingo, who is an odd one.
Their relationship is a bit strange anyway because she calls him
"Shingo-kun". He's a police officer and gets called away all the time
to investigate bizarre crimes.

Matoi's best friend is Yuma, who is daughter of the high priest of a shrine
who is a clown. Anyway, with one thing and another there is a demonic appearance
at that location and it defeats everyone who tries to fight it. Yuma found an
ancient scroll which describes how to do exorcisms and is all excited to give it
a try, and it works, sort of. Only when the divine power comes down out of the
sky it doesn't go to Yuma; it goes to Matoi. And she transforms into the
spitting image of her mother, with a fancy costume, and easily defeats the
demon.

It looks like Matoi has the ability to summon some sort of goddess and to
join with her, gaining tremendous powers. (Or maybe it's Yuma who does the
summoning.) Matoi doesn't want this, and it looks like part of this show is
"reluctant hero".

Good news: one of the main characters is voiced by Ayako Kawasumi. It's been
too long since we've heard her in a show. Unfortunately, her character is rather
deadpan, so at least so far it isn't much of an opportunity to act.

Bad news: Horriblesubs is stealing it from Anime Network, and it's hard
subbed. I hope there's a raw source somewhere and some circle picks it up.

UPDATE: Ohys has posted a raw, so I think it likely someone will post a soft-sub.

September 27, 2016

1
My grandfather used to tell that when he was a teenager, after a hard morning of pulling all the damn hemp that popped up as weeds, he and his brother would sneak off behind the barn to smoke cornsilk. "If I knew now what I knew back then, I'd have been a lot happier about pulling hemp..."

September 24, 2016

So the last episode came out, and you're probably (not) wondering what the
series was about. I didn't watch it all but I watched enough to get a pretty
good idea.

Good: Lots of super powered girls flying around tossing energy bolts all over
the place.

Good: The girls are cute and nicely shaped.

Good: No lolis.

Good: Bathing scenes. LOTS of bathing scenes. Ep 12 was the only one that
didn't have a bathing scene. I expected that they'd toss one in at the very end
as a nudity curtain call, but they surprised me. Anyway, ep 12 had several girls
getting MCSA'ed so there were still Buy the BD shots. I swear this show
has more screen minutes in the bath than any other series I can think of. (Even more than Popotan!) In
fact, more total screen minutes than any three other series I can think of,
combined.

Good: Tamura Yukari did the voice of Amane. It sounded enough like Nanoha
that I recognized her instantly but not so much as to make the character
unbelievable. (There were plenty enough other reasons to disbelieve the
character.) I really like her work and she hasn't been getting enough in recent
years. It's nice that she's managing to break out of being typecast.

Good: The enemy is so abstract that there's no trace of guilt when seeing the
girls shooting and destroying them. It's not even clear that the enemy is alive,
so it may not even be killing.

Bad: The real story. At the beginning it would be easy enough to think that
the story is about alien invasion, but it's actually about shoujo angst. Waah!
I'm lonely! I'm not special and people ignore me! I wanna be a star and have
people worship me! Waah! All six major characters go through that, and in
particular they express their resentment towards Amane (the alpha driver for the
team) because they are low ranked and they don't think she's feeding them enough
power to be stars. So then Amane crashes and gets captured and isn't around any
more, and we get ten episodes of the other five coming to realize just how much
they like and trust and need Amane -- and then in the last episode all that
comes together and their newly positive feelings save her, and the six working together again, finally
clear of all the resentment and angst, kick the butt of the enemy.

Man, I tell you: if it weren't for the copious fan service I'd think this
show was targetted at grade school girls. The only thing that can save five
universes is our friendship with each other!

Anyway, it's apparent that the characterization and the story are simply a
coat rack onto which they are hanging lots of fan service and it only had to be
elaborate enough so that it didn't seem to be TOTALLY pandering -- even though
it is.

It's the first series directing job for the
director. He has a long track record in production, doing character designs
and episode directing but this is his first series. I can't claim it's a success
but it's clear he did what he was told to do so I can't say it's a bad job. The
massive flaws with the series aren't his fault. Anyway, everyone has to start
somewhere and I think it's good enough so he'll get other chances, and maybe
next time he'll be able to do something better.

I'm not sure I believe that the BDs will sell well. The first will, but they
give away the store in the first episode (EVERY major character has a bath
scene) and it's not clear that customers will shell out to see all the same
girls naked again, five more times. Oh, they'll sell some, but the first one
will sell the most.

Verdict: Completely forgettable -- until the first BD comes out.

Rewatch? Surely you jest; it wasn't even worth watching the first time. (And
I didn't watch it all.)

September 22, 2016

Haifuri -- Ship mystery

Part of the "Girls in combat machines" genre is that the weapon
systems they use should be accurate and based on existing equipment (unless it's
mechas, in which case blah).

So the tanks in Girls und Panzer are actual tanks which fought in WWII
or were deployed but didn't see combat. And in High School Fleet the
ships we see are all actual designs from the era (or modern ships).

Haifuri is an alternate timeline. For one thing, Japan didn't
participate in WWII. For another, in that timeline heavier-than-air aircraft
were never developed. There are blimps, but no airplanes and no helicopters.
Which leads in some cases to anachronisms (like why Musashi has
anti-aircraft batteries) but let that pass.

A lot of the ships in the series actually did exist. Harekaze is
completely fictional; there never was such a ship. But it's based on the Kagerou-class
which really did exist, and were excellent ships. Like most destroyers their
best weapon was their torpedoes, and like most Japanese destroyers the Kagerou's
carried the Long Lance,
the best torpedo of the early war.

The Blue Mermaids use ships which are based on the American Independence-class
littoral combat ships. Modern Japan doesn't have anything like that, but they
look really cool and really modern so I'm not surprised that the director
decided to poach them. Trimarans are awesome.

And there's these things, which they call "skippers". I want to
call them "water motorcycles" but of course they aren't. I don't
recognize them. It looks like they're hydrofoils, and it looks like they're
propelled by a pair of baby jet engines. Given that everything else in the show is
realistic, are these based on something real?

The best torpedo of the war, full stop. The only torp that could be considered in the same ballpark as it would be the German G7es "Zaunkonig" torpedo, and that only because it was a moderately effective acoustic homing weapon.

3
If those really were Long Lances in the last episode then it's no surprise that
8 of them striking the starboard rear of Musashi was enough to slow it down. They probably took out the starboard engine room. Even a Yamato can't shrug that off.

I just looked at that. It's a diving machine, so obviously it's not the stem of this idea.

It's possible that the director just made these up. In fact, it seems likely because that design really is terrible. If a high wave or some sort of splash hit the intake of one of those engines, well, I wouldn't want to be nearby.

But that's OK; it's ultimately a fantasy and a good director shouldn't let engineer's disease interfere with telling a good story.

6
The intake is what always interested me about Seabreacher, too. The craft is powered by a typical piston engine. Originally they used a common Chevy V-8, but switched to Rotax early on, because it's lighter for the power. The intake is on a snorkel mast, so it sticks out of the water most of the time.... but not always. You can even see videos of Seabreacher banking or rolling 360 degrees. There must be some kind of a device, including possibly a cut-off valve and an accumulator tank, or something more clever, which provides an uninterrupted supply of air to the engine. We can postulate a similar device a "skipper" too.